Sunday, February 21, 2016

Recently
I was contacted by Library Journal (LJ)
in connection with a series of video interviews it is conducting with open
access “VIP’s and leaders”. The first interview – with the Director of Harvard
University’s Office for Scholarly Communication Peter Suber – has already been published. Would I have
some time to do an interview myself, I was asked? The project is for a new section
of LJ’s web site sponsored by the open access publisher Dove Press.

I
liked the idea of doing a video interview but I was instinctively shy of being
associated with a project that has a large Dove Press banner on the top right
hand corner proclaiming it to be the “exclusive sponsor” of the site, along
with a list of featured articles with “Sponsored by Dove Medical Press” in prominent
red ink strapped across the top of each one. I felt that taking part would
amount to endorsing Dove Press, which for reasons I will explain below I did
not want to do.

I
emailed LJ back to say I was not comfortable with doing an interview for a site
sponsored by Dove Press, and asked whether it would consider posting any such video
elsewhere on the LJ site. Strangely, I received no reply to this. As I was now intrigued
as to how this site had come about, who had suggested the idea, and what its
purpose was I also emailed LJ’s Managing Editor. To this too I received no
reply.

So what
are my reservations about being associated with Dove Press? There are a number
of issues here, including a discomfort with the publisher’s marketing and PR activities,
a concern with its editorial processes, some puzzlement over its lack of transparency,
and a suspicion that its commitment to open access is not as deep as I would
like.

Let’s
be clear, while some
have accused Dove Press of being a “predatory” publisher, I am making no such
claim here. Nor could I, since I don’t have sufficient information to make a
judgement either way. I am just stating the reasons why I personally do not
want to be associated with the company.

A
researcher-led initiative envisaged as being “by scientists, for scientists” the
mission of Frontiers was to create a “community-oriented
open access scholarly publisher and social networking platform for researchers.”

To
this end, Frontiers has been innovative in a number of ways, most notably with its
“collaborative peer review process”. This abjures the traditional hierarchical
approach to editorial decisions in favour of reaching “consensual” outcomes. In
addition, papers are judged in an “impact-neutral” way: while expected to meet
an objective threshold before being publicly validated as a correct scientific
contribution, their significance and impact are not assessed.

Frontiers
has also experimented with a variety of novel publication formats, created Loop
– a “research network” intended to foster and support open science – and pioneered
altmetrics before the term had been coined.

Two
other important components of the Frontiers’ concept were that it would operate
on a non-profit basis (via the Frontiers Research Foundation), and that while
it would initially levy article-processing charges (APCs) for publishing
papers, this would subsequently be replaced by a sponsored funding model.

This
latter goal has yet to be realised. “We dreamed of a zero-cost model, which was
probably too idealistic and it was obviously not possible to start that way”,
says Kamila Markram below.

Frontiers
also quickly concluded that its non-profit status would not allow it to achieve
its goals. “We realised early on that we would need more funds to make the
vision sustainable and it would not be possible to secure these funds through
purely philanthropic means,” explains Markram.

Consequently,
in 2008 Frontiers reinvented itself as a for-profit publisher called Frontiers
Media SA. It also began looking for additional sources of revenue, including
patent royalties – seeking, for instance, to patent its peer review process by
means of a controversial
business method patent.

The
patent strategy was also short-lived. “We abandoned the patent application by
not taking any action by the specific deadline given by the patent office and
deliberately let it die,” says Markram, adding, “we soon realised that it is
far better just to keep innovating than waste one’s time on a patent.” (Henry
Markram nevertheless remains an active patent applicant).

By
the time the peer review patent had died it was in any case apparent that Frontiers’
pay-to-publish model was working well. In fact, business was booming, and to
date Frontiers has published around 41,000 papers by
120,000 authors.
It has also recruited 59,000 editors, and currently publishes 54 journals. By
2011 the company had turned “cash positive” (five years
after it was founded).